The RIP Famous Person Thread

Chuck Yeager: First pilot to fly supersonic dies aged 97

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US test pilot Chuck Yeager, the first person to break the sound barrier, has died aged 97, his wife says.

In a tweet, Victoria Yeager wrote: "It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET."

Yeager went into the history books after his flight in the Bell X-1 experimental rocket plane in 1947.

He later broke several other speed and altitude records, helping to pave the way for the US space programme.

Chuck Yeager: First pilot to fly supersonic dies aged 97 - BBC News

^ He had plenty of practice at growing wings, looks like he's finally got them.

An absolute legend...

Dame Barbara Windsor: Carry On and EastEnders actress dies aged 83

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Actress Dame Barbara Windsor, best known for her roles in EastEnders and the Carry On films, has died aged 83.

Her husband Scott Mitchell said she had died peacefully from Alzheimer's at a London care home on Thursday evening.

She had been diagnosed with the disease in 2014 and had moved to a care home earlier this year.

Mr Mitchell said she would be remembered for the "love, fun, friendship and brightness she brought to all our lives".

Dame Barbara appeared in nine of the 31 films in the comedy series Carry On, and Sparrows Can't Sing, for which she was nominated for a Bafta, as well as small parts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and On the Fiddle with Sir Sean Connery.

She was well known to millions of TV viewers for her portrayal of landlady Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders, starring alongside her on-screen children Ross Kemp and Steve McFadden.

Her last appearance in the soap came in 2016, the same year she was made a dame for her services to charity and entertainment.

She also worked in theatre - making her stage debut at 13 - and appeared in productions including Oh! What A Lovely War and Fings Ain't Wot They Used To Be.

After her dementia diagnosis Dame Barbara became an ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society and met prime Minister Boris Johnson to raise awareness about the disease.

The star delivered a letter signed by 100,000 people pleading for better care for people affected by dementia and saying the system was "completely inadequate, unfair, unsustainable and in dire need of more money".


Dame Barbara Windsor: Carry On and EastEnders actress dies aged 83 - BBC News


Who can forget...

Carry On Camping - YouTube

British Cinema: Carry On Camping (1969) - YouTube

Did you know , that Chuck Yeager was a prick ? He sued so many ppl that he's no longer allowed to sue anyone. He even sued his kids. So I've heard

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Originally Posted by Backspin

So I've heard

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...url(s) or it didn't happen...

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Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

And no other journalist bullshitted about it from the poolside like he did either.

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Well that is interesting. An Iraqi mate of mine , said that he is bar none, the best foreigner to report on the Middle East. Said his understanding of the place was spot on.

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Originally Posted by tomcat

...url(s) or it didn't happen...

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Record-Setting Pilot Chuck Yeager Sues His Children - The New York Times

Chuck Yeager sues Airbus for mentioning Chuck Yeager in an article - Ars Technica OpenForum


Somebody please shut Chuck Yeager up. | Pilots of America

John le Carré bought the farm.

John le Carre: Espionage writer dies aged 89 - BBC News

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Originally Posted by Little Chuchok

Well that is interesting. An Iraqi mate of mine , said that he is bar none, the best foreigner to report on the Middle East. Said his understanding of the place was spot on.

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There is a thread someone opened about him. Go and read that.

Leslie West, Mountain Guitarist Who Belted Out ‘Mississippi Queen,’ Dead at 75

Leslie West, the towering guitarist who created the hard-rock milestone “Mississippi Queen” with his band Mountain, died Wednesday morning. West’s brother, Larry West Weinstein, confirmed the musician’s death to Rolling Stone. He was 75. The cause of death was cardiac arrest. On Monday, West was rushed to a hospital after suffering cardiac arrest at his home near Daytona, Florida, where he never regained consciousness.

Released in 1970 on Mountain’s debut album, Climbing!, “Mississippi Queen” was two and a half minutes of boisterous bliss built around West’s burly yowl and guitar blasts and drummer Corky Laing’s completely unironic cowbell. One of those never-say-die songs of the classic-rock era, “Mississippi Queen” has been featured in countless soundtracks, TV shows (The Americans, The Simpsons), and in Guitar Hero III. In an interview with Guitar Player earlier this year, West said the song “has just everything you need to make it a winner. You’ve got the cowbell, the riff is pretty damn good, and it sounds incredible. It feels like it wants to jump out of your car radio. To me, it sounds like a big, thick milkshake. It’s rich and chocolatey. Who doesn’t love that?”

A contemporary of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrix, West was respected for his versatile playing (from fingerpicking to metallic power chords) and was revered by a new generation of guitar players who followed. In 2011, Eddie Van Halen told Rolling Stone that West and Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore were among his biggest influences: “Leslie West has this incredible tone in Mountain,” Van Halen said.

Born Leslie Weinstein on October 22nd, 1945, West grew up in the New York area — Manhattan, Long Island, and Forest Hills, Queens — and was a founding member of the Vagrants, a blue-eyed soul garage band of the mid-Sixties. The group (which also included his brother Larry on bass) scored two minor hits — “I Can’t Make a Friend” and a cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” (released just ahead of Aretha Franklin’s titanic version) — before West left the band. A turning point, he once said, was seeing Cream at the Village Theatre (later the Fillmore East) in 1967. “My brother said to me, ‘Let’s take some acid before we go,’ ” West told Blues Rock Review in 2015. “So we took LSD and all of a sudden the curtain opens up and I hear them playing ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ and I see Eric Clapton and his buckskin jacket. I said, ‘Oh, my God, we really suck.’ After that, I started really practicing and practicing.”

With the help of Cream producer and bass player Felix Pappalardi, who met West when he was producing the Vagrants, West made a solo album, Mountain. Mountain also became the name of the band the two men formed — “because I was so fat!” West later joked.

West was known for electric-shock white blues riffing, but could also play more fluid melodic lines (as heard in Mountain’s “Nantucket Sleighride” and his solo in their “Theme for an Imaginary Western”). “The thing that most impressed me when I started was how, with Clapton, you could identity his sound like a signature,” West told the L.A. Times in 1990. “I wanted to have a sound you could identify like that. I was never a speed player. I tried to capitalize on my vibrato. I hope I’m regarded as a melodic guitar player, not someone up there going ‘weinie, weinie,’ all night long.”

When Cream disbanded in 1968, a new generation of even more muscular guitar-based bands were ready to pick up where they left off. Mountain loomed particularly large, and not merely due to West’s bulky size and head of frizzy hair. Reviewing an early Mountain show, one critic described him as a “300-pounder dressed in blue velvet, suede, and snakeskin.”

The original incarnation of Mountain scored a high-profile appearance at the Woodstock festival — on the second day, between Canned Heat and the Grateful Dead. “I think I had the most amplifiers of anybody there,” West told Rolling Stone in 1989. “It was paralyzing because that stage, that setting, was some kind of natural amphitheater. The sound was so loud and shocking that I got scared. But once I started playing, I just kept going because I was afraid to stop.” West also contributed some unreleased parts to the Who’s Who’s Next.

Although Mountain garnered a large following, the group broke up in 1972. Taking his Cream roots to a new level, West formed a Cream-style power trio with Mountain drummer Corky Laing and Cream’s Jack Bruce. The group released three albums and sold out New York’s Carnegie Hall, but in 1974, West reformed Mountain for two more records.

The following year, West formally went on his own with his album The Great Fatsby, a musically varied album that showcased softer sides of his style and also, in its title, poked fun at his weight issues. The album featured “High Roller,” co-written by West with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards; Jagger also played guitar on the track. The album failed to elevate West into a star solo act, and over the next few decades, he would alternate between solo albums and touring and recording with different versions of Mountain.

West’s health had been an issue for many years. In the mid-Seventies, he moved to Milwaukee to kick a heroin habit. In a 1990 interview, he said it had been 10 years since he had “stopped fooling with narcotics.” In the mid-Eighties, he was diagnosed with diabetes — his lower right leg was amputated due to complications from the disease — and promptly lost 85 pounds, dropping to 200. But his weight fluctuated over the years.

In the years that followed, West continued working: He was a regular on Howard Stern’s radio show, recorded solo records, and took a few stabs at acting, including in 1986’s The Money Pit. Mountain continued on and off with different lineups, and the band released an album of Bob Dylan covers, Masters of War, in 2007; Ozzy Osbourne sang lead on the title remake. Attesting to West’s stature, his 2011 album, The Unusual Suspects, included contributions from Slash, Billy Gibbons, and Zakk Wylde, and West’s last album, Soundcheck, featured Peter Frampton.

Other than “Mississippi Queen,” “Long Red,” a slice of psychedelic blues from Mountain, remains one of West’s lasting legacies. A drum beat from a live recording of the song, played by N.D. Smart, has been sampled by numerous rap acts, including De La Soul, the Game, ASAP Rocky, and, most notably, Kanye West in “The Glory” and Jay-Z in “99 Problems.” ”There was something about that song that appealed to rappers,” the guitarist told Blues Blast magazine in 2015. “I’ve got six different platinum albums on my wall from all these different guys sampling my stuff. When I wrote that song in 1969, there was no hip-hop. It just so happens that song has a hip-hop beat.” West’s legacy extends well beyond hip-hop, though; numerous bands have covered his material, most recently Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin remaking “Mississippi Queen” earlier this month for their “Hanukkah Sessions.”

West, who had moved to Florida last month, is survived by his wife, Jenni Maurer; the couple married onstage at a Woodstock 40th anniversary concert in 2009. Of his own mixture of blues and metal, West told The Morning Call in 2000, “It’s like being a chef. You might use the same ingredients as everyone else, but it’s how you put them together. You end up with your own style.”: Mountain's Leslie West, Who Belted Out 'Mississippi Queen,' Dead at 75 - Rolling Stone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEnF6EB-yMs

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Originally Posted by S Landreth

With the help of Cream producer and bass player Felix Pappalardi

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Probably should have put that the other way round. :)

Although his contribution was not insignificant.

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As a producer, Pappalardi is perhaps best known for his work with Cream, beginning with their second album, Disraeli Gears. Pappalardi has been referred to in various interviews with the members of Cream as "the fourth member of the band" as he generally had a role in arranging their music. He contributed instrumentation for his studio arrangements and he and his wife, Gail Collins, wrote the Cream hit "Strange Brew" with Eric Clapton

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I hear that George Blake died.

Some life, he had

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Originally Posted by helge

I hear that George Blake died.

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Yup. He's мертвый.

George Blake: Soviet Cold War spy and former MI6 officer dies in Russia - BBC News

BBC Four HD Masterspy Of Moscow George Blake (2015) - YouTube

That's all five of the treasonous rats dead then.

Added: tell a lie, he was never officially one of them.

French fashion designer Pierre Cardin has died aged 97


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The French fashion designer Pierre Cardin has died aged 97.

One of the boldest voices of the 1960s and 1970s, and known for his futuristic vision, Cardin became famous for using unconventional materials such as plastic and perspex in his designs.

He was later recognised as a savvy business man. Cardin was one of the first big designers to license his name across range of products.

Born in Venice, Italy in 1922, he emigrated to France as a child. His family have confirmed his death on Tuesday, 29 December at a hospital in Neuilly, near Paris to AFP news agency.

French fashion designer Pierre Cardin has died aged 97 | The National

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Cardin was one of the first big designers to license his name across range of products.

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I bet he's spinning in his grave after seeing some of the crap with his name on it.

I had dinner with him and his partner in Paris back in the very early 90s. I got the impression he enjoyed mocking the world.

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Originally Posted by Sleeper

I bet he's spinning in his grave

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Textile kinda guy

Gilligan’s Island star Dawn Wells dies due to coronavirus complications aged 82

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Gilligan’s Island star Dawn Wells has died due to coronavirus complications aged 82, her publicist has confirmed. The actress, who played the girl-next-door castaway Mary Ann on the iconic CBS comedy series, passed away in Los Angeles on Wedneday morning. Dawn was best known for her role in the beloved show, in which she starred alongside Bob Denver, Alan Hale Jr, Jim Backus, Natalie Schafer, Tina Louise and Russell Johnson. The series first aired in 1964 on CBS.

Speaking about her time on the show, Dawn told Forbes in 2016: ‘A misconception is that we must be wealthy, rolling in the dough, because we got residuals. ‘We didn’t really get a dime. I think my salary – of course, I was low on the totem pole, Ginger [Tina Louise] and Thurston [Jim Backus] got more – was $750 (£550) a week. Sherwood Schwartz, our producer, reportedly made $90 million (£66 million) on the reruns alone!’

Gilligan's Island star Dawn Wells dead: Actress dies from covid at 82 | Metro News

RIP all ya shit kickers.

2020, THE MOST TRAGIC YEAR OF COUNTRY & WESTERN. Singers, Songwriters & Personalities´ List - YouTube

One for the devil who recently went to Georgia. Give him hell Charlie.

Charlie Daniels Band - The Devil Went Down To Georgia (Live at Farm Aid 1985) - YouTube

Gerry and the Pacemakers singer Gerry Marsden, whose version of You'll Never Walk Alone became a football terrace anthem for his hometown club of Liverpool, has died at the age of 78.

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Gerry Marsden, singer of You'll Never Walk Alone, dies aged 78

Tanya Roberts, Bond girl, Charlie’s Angel and ‘That ’70s Show’ star, dies aged 65

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Tanya Roberts, who starred in That ’70s Show and played a Bond girl in A View To A Kill, has died. She was 65.

The American actress had collapsed on Christmas eve after going for a walk with her dogs, TMZ reported. She was admitted to Cedar-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and died on Sunday (January 3).

Roberts’ death was not COVID-19 related, both publications reported, and she was not ill in the days leading up to her passing, even conducting Zoom ‘shows’ and live chats with fans as recently as December 19.

No cause of death has been given. Roberts is survived by her longtime partner Lance O’Brien and her sister Barbara.

The actress, who was born Victoria Leigh Blum in the Bronx, New York, made her acting debut in 1975 with horror film Forced Entry. She is arguably best known for her role as the Bond girl Stacey Sutton opposite Roger Moore in 1985’s A View To A Kill, which was Moore’s last outing as 007.

She was also known for film roles in Beastmaster, Sheena, Night’s Eyes and Almost Pregnant.

As for television roles, Roberts joined ABC’s Charlie’s Angels in its fifth and final season in 1980-1981. In the late ’90s, she had a recurring supporting role in That ’70s Show as Midge Pinciotti, mother of Donna (Laura Prepon). She left the Fox sitcom in 2001 after its third season, reportedly to care for her terminally ill husband.

Tanya Roberts, Bond girl, Charlie's Angel and 'That '70s Show' star, dies aged 65

Give her a break...she ain't dead yet. Just resting :)


Tanya Roberts Is Alive, Rep Says - Variety

Tanya Roberts' Partner Explains Why He Thought She Had Died

Tanya Roberts - Wikipedia

Unfortunately she has now died.

Bond girl Tanya Roberts dead at 65 after mixup: 'Devastated'

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Originally Posted by Latindancer

Unfortunately she has now died.

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Probably....

Tanya Roberts’ Boyfriend Is Told She's Alive Mid-Interview - YouTube

I had nothing to do with it, I can assure you.

Albert Roux obituary

Chef, restaurateur and businessman who paved the way for a culinary rebirth in Britain when he opened Le Gavroche in 1967

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When Albert Roux opened the restaurant Le Gavroche in Lower Sloane Street, central London, in partnership with his younger brother, Michel, in 1967, the most innovative kitchens in Britain were often run by amateur cooks from other walks of life, who lacked that rigorous youthful apprenticeship and hard graft that was the presumed career path of any haute cuisine chef worth his (rarely her) salt.

Beyond the grandest hotels, which still followed the precepts of Escoffier and other French masters, British restaurants paid homage to a cookery – still most often French – that was both more domestic and more relaxed. They were awful.

Le Gavroche operated on a different plane and set standards of thoroughgoing classic French cooking that had not been seen for many years. It acted as training ground and spearhead of a revival of serious (and expensive) French restauration that spread through the capital and beyond.

Albert, who has died aged 85, was not merely a chef, he was also a businessman of energy and acuity. The brothers soon had a handful of restaurants, a charcuterie and a butcher’s shop under their direct control, as well as setting up former members of staff in places of their own, pioneering vacuum-packed sous-vide dishes for the restaurant trade, undertaking contract and outside catering, and acting as consultants. Their enterprise was one of the foundation stones of modern British food culture.

Born in Semur-en-Brionnais, a village in southern Burgundy, Albert was the eldest son, and second child, of Henri Roux, a third-generation charcutier, and his wife, Germaine (nee Triger). After the second world war the family moved to St Mandé, a suburb to the east of Paris. Albert’s early career, after training as a pâtissier – though originally harbouring thoughts of the priesthood – was as private chef to wealthy Britons (save a stint at the French embassy in London and two years at the British embassy in Paris).

He did not cook in a commercial kitchen until the age of 32. His first job, described as “scullery boy” on his work permit, was with Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor, at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire. His longest engagement was with Major Peter Cazalet, racehorse trainer to the Queen Mother, among others, at his Fairlawne estate in Kent. After eight years he nursed an ambition to start his own restaurant, in partnership with Michel – though he retained an abiding love of racing (as well as being a keen fisherman).

Le Gavroche (meaning “street urchin”) opened to a glittering launch party: Rolls-Royces were double-parked. The interior was the work of the society designer David Mlinaric; on the walls hung borrowed paintings by Chagall, Miró and Dalí – all signs that this new place had the poshest of patronage. The original backers came from Cazalet’s friends and City acquaintances, as well as corporate input from International Distillers.

All the tropes of haute cuisine were on show: mousses, forcemeats, reductions, emulsions and complex sauces and, most particularly, ingredients and raw materials esteemed by the French.

This meant at first that Albert’s wife, Monique (whom he had married in 1959), was dispatched across the Channel to smuggle back foie gras, poulets de Bresse and Challans duck, then unobtainable in Britain. This was to be the impetus for the brothers arranging a constant supply line from the Rungis vegetable market in Paris, which resulted eventually in a large business provisioning restaurants throughout London.

Although there may have seemed an emphasis on elaborate and fanciful dishes, Albert also nursed an affection for the standbys of French cuisine bourgeoise: his Pot au Feu Sauce Albert, which figured on the very first menu, was a case in point.

Wealthy high-living diners may have made a beeline for the restaurant, but it did not immediately meet with universal approval. Reporters to the Good Food Guide (which infuses its gastronomy with a certain flavour of the British middle classes) found its prices too high, its resolute embrace of the rich and famous disconcerting and its waiting staff impossible. It was even dropped entirely from the 1970 edition.

However, the thoroughness of the brothers’ approach, and the skills on display in their kitchen, ensured its ultimate acceptance, with a single star awarded by Michelin’s first British edition in 1974, then the ultimate three-star accolade the year after the restaurant moved to new premises in Upper Brook Street, Mayfair, in 1981.

Albert’s enthusiasm for business, while he still found the time to remain a chef of accuracy and finesse (with not a little love of richness), was remarkable. In this he differed from Michel, who preferred to concentrate on a single defining project. In a few years, the enterprise had expanded in many directions.

There were satellite restaurants: the Poulbot (also meaning urchin), the Brasserie Benoît (later Le Gamin), the Waterside Inn on the Thames at Bray (which came to be Michel’s particular responsibility), Gavvers (on the old Gavroche site), Rouxl Britannia (which offered sous-vide dishes from a central kitchen, with no chef in evidence) and Les Trois Plats.

Then there were shops: the charcuterie Le Cochon Rose (run by Albert’s elder sister Liliane), and the Boucherie Lamartine in Ebury Street. The brothers organised contract catering, created a central pâtisserie and ran a restaurant supply business. Finally, they set up a boutique hotel in Park Street, close to the new Gavroche.

In 1986 they agreed to separate their business interests, Albert remaining at the helm of many of these subsidiary activities. Some of these were eventually sold to the Compass Group in 1993, with Albert as consultant. Others were sold or closed during the 1990s.

The Roux brothers’ restaurants were also an important seminary for young chefs, at first French but latterly British, who went on to make their mark at home and abroad, among them Pierre Koffmann, Christian Germain, Jean-Louis Tabaillaud, René Bajard, Christian Delteil, Rowley Leigh, Gordon Ramsay, Steven Doherty, Peter Chandler, Marcus Wareing and Marco Pierre White.

It was estimated that more than half of Britain’s Michelin-starred restaurants in 2013 were run by Roux seminarians. This educational role was broadened by the Roux scholarship scheme, started in 1984, as well as Albert’s long involvement with many colleges. His star pupil of course was his son Michel Roux Jr, to whom he ceded control of Le Gavroche in 1991.

Albert’s later years were devoted especially to consultancy work with the Compass Group and others, giving rise to a number of Roux restaurants in London, Scotland (for which he had particular affection, due to his love of fishing in the Highlands and Islands) and abroad (not forgetting his British restaurant, Berties, in Paris).

In the 80s Albert appeared on the pioneering television cookery programme Take Six Chefs. This was followed by the series At Home with the Roux Brothers on the BBC in 1987, which brought them unexpected TV popularity.

While instructing home cooks how to prepare proper stocks, or how best to use a litre of cream for their soufflés suissesses, they engaged in strongly French-accented banter worthy of a comedy act, sharpened by their not being at the time on the best of terms, and heightened by the contrast in their respective physiques: Michel slender and elegant, Albert the short and bustling one. The recipe book that accompanied the series, together with their earlier New Classic Cuisine (1983), is a valuable record.

Albert was made OBE in 2002 and a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2005. He took British citizenship in 2015. His marriage to Monique ended in divorce in 2001; his second marriage, to Cheryl Smith in 2006, ended in divorce in 2016.

He married again, to Maria, and is survived by his children from his first marriage, Michel Jr and Danielle.

• Albert Michel Roux, chef and restaurateur, born 8 October 1935; died 4 January 2021

Albert Roux obituary | Restaurants | The Guardian

Neil Sheehan Dies at 84; Times Reporter Obtained the Pentagon Papers


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Neil Sheehan, the Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, leading the government for the first time in American history to get a judge to block publication of an article on grounds of national security, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 84.

Susan Sheehan, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Sheehan, who covered the war from 1962 to 1966 for United Press International and The Times, was also the author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1989. Reviewing it in the Times, Ronald Steel wrote, “If there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it.”

Intense and driven, Mr. Sheehan arrived in Vietnam at age 25, a believer in the American mission. He left, four years later, disillusioned and anguished. He later spent what he described as a grim and monastic 16 years on “A Bright Shining Lie,” in the hope that the book would move Americans finally to come to grips with the war.

“I simply cannot help worrying that, in the process of waging this war, we are corrupting ourselves,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1966. “I wonder, when I look at the bombed-out peasant hamlets, the orphans begging and stealing on the streets of Saigon and the women and children with napalm burns lying on the hospital cots, whether the United States or any nation has the right to inflict this suffering and degradation on another people for its own ends.”

Mr. Sheehan’s readiness to entertain the notion that Americans might have committed war crimes prompted Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had turned against the war, to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of American decision-making on Vietnam, to him in 1971. The papers revealed that successive administrations had expanded U.S. involvement in the war and intensified attacks on North Vietnam while obscuring their doubts about the likelihood of success.

At 7,000 pages, the leak was the largest disclosure of classified documents in American history up to that point. After the third day of The Times’s coverage, the Nixon administration got a temporary injunction blocking further publication. The Supreme Court’s ruling 17 days later allowing publication to resume has been seen as a statement that prior restraint on freedom of the press is rarely justified. The Times won a Pulitzer, for public service, for its coverage by Mr. Sheehan and others.

In the days after the temporary injunction against the Times, The Washington Post and several other newspapers began publishing their own articles on the Pentagon Papers — only to be blocked themselves until the Supreme Court upheld the right of The Times and The Post to publish.

The next year, Mr. Sheehan took a book leave from The Times after attending the funeral of John Paul Vann, a charismatic, idealistic former Army officer and outspoken dissenter on the war, whom Mr. Sheehan had known in Vietnam. He set out to write the history of the war through the figure of Mr. Vann, who seemed to Mr. Sheehan to embody the qualities that Americans admired in themselves, and to personify the American venture. He expected the book to take three to five years.

But he lost more than a year recovering from a head-on collision with a car that a young man was driving on the wrong side of a road. Mr. Sheehan repeatedly ran out of money. His subjects, humanity and war, proved more complicated than even he had known.

Disciplined and nocturnal, he worked regularly until 4 a.m. Impressed by Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” he labored to give his book — a combination of history and biography — the narrative drive of a novel. “It was a grim business,” he said. He was, he said later, less obsessed than trapped.

The book ended up 861 pages long.

Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan was born on Oct. 27, 1936, in Holyoke, Mass., a son of Irish immigrants. His father, Cornelius Joseph Sheehan, was a dairy farmer, and his mother, Mary (O’Shea) Sheehan, was a homemaker.

Neil (his nickname from the time he was born) grew up on his family’s dairy farm outside Holyoke, attending Mass with his two brothers every Sunday at his mother’s insistence. He received full scholarships to both the Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts and Harvard, where he studied Middle Eastern history and graduated in 1958.

He then joined the Army, becoming a journalist to get out of a job as a pay clerk in Korea. Transferred to Tokyo to put out the division newspaper, he moonlighted for United Press International, which hired him in 1962 and sent him to Saigon as a reporter, two weeks out of the Army, for $75 a week.

He was one of the youngest and least experienced of a group of celebrated correspondents that included David Halberstam of The Times, who became his collaborator and friend. In 1964, The Times hired Mr. Sheehan and sent him back to Vietnam. Impassioned and haunted, he had what his wife later called “a quasi-religious streak.” By 1966, he wrote, the moral superiority that the United States had possessed after World War II had “given way to the amorality of great power politics.”

In The New York Times Book Review in December 1970, he wrote that the United States “desperately needs a sane and honest inquiry into the question of war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam.

Three months later, he concluded that there was no moral or legal difference between the killing of 25,000 noncombatants in the Philippines during World War II, for which the United States had tried and hanged a Japanese general, and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Vietnam. “The more perspective we gain on our behavior, the uglier our conduct appears,” he wrote.

Mr. Ellsberg, who had copied the Pentagon Papers illicitly in the hope of hastening the end of the war, wrote in his 2002 memoir that he had offered them to Mr. Sheehan and later gave him a key to the apartment in Cambridge, Mass., where he had stashed them. He told Mr. Sheehan he could make notes but not photocopy the documents. He learned only later, he wrote, that Mr. Sheehan had returned when Mr. Ellsberg was out of town, removed the papers, photocopied them and taken the copies back to The Times.

Mr. Sheehan, who never spoke publicly about how he had gotten the papers, agreed in 2015 to tell his story to The Times on the condition that it be published only after his death. In that interview, he said Mr. Ellsberg had agreed initially to allow him to make a copy of the papers, then reneged, fearing prosecution and imprisonment.

Convinced that the papers were too important for him to run the risk that they might never be made public, Mr. Sheehan took advantage of Mr. Ellsberg’s absence from Cambridge to override his instructions, spiriting the copied documents back to Washington in bags strapped onto an airplane seat beside him.

Accepting an award later that year, Mr. Sheehan said that The Times, in publishing the papers, had given “to the American people, who had given to those who governed us 45,000 of their sons and $100 billion of their treasure, a small accounting of a debt that can never be repaid.”

“But if to report now be called theft, and if to publish now be called treason, then so be it,” he added. “Let God give us the courage to commit more of the same.”

Mr. Sheehan was the author of three other books, including “After the War Was Over: Hanoi and Saigon,” based on a trip to Vietnam in 1989, and “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon” (2009), a history of the arms race and the story of the Air Force general responsible for the creation of America’s intercontinental ballistic missile system.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Sheehan is survived by two brothers, Patrick and Eugene; two daughters, Maria Sheehan and Catherine Sheehan Bruno; and two grandsons.

“Some days I wake up and I think, I’m not young anymore, I’ve got a bum knee, I’ll never be able to jump out of a helicopter again like I used to do in the Mekong Delta,” Mr. Sheehan was quoted as saying in an article by his wife, published the year after “A Bright Shining Lie” came out. “But then I think, ‘What the hell, age catches up with you whatever you do, and I’ve been lucky. I saw more of our daughters than most fathers do, and I wrote the book I wanted to write.’”

Neil Sheehan Dies at 84; Times Reporter Obtained the Pentagon Papers - The New York Times

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Mr. Sheehan’s readiness to entertain the notion that Americans might have committed war crimes

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Lucky that he had not disclosed the war atrocities in these days, could have been sentenced to 130 years...

Or b e forced to live for years in a London embassy and then be held in jail, be severely stressed out, and generally have his life screwed up.

^Actually, the best would be to accuse him first of a rape... Now in the era of metoo it would be even worst than just a regular healthy rape...

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Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Mr. Sheehan, who covered the war from 1962 to 1966 for United Press International and The Times, was also the author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1989. Reviewing it in the Times, Ronald Steel wrote, “If there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it.”

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I enjoyed the book and the film...

First Roy, now Siegfried.

Illusionist Siegfried Fischbacher ‘dies in Las Vegas’ aged 81

The doctor who said the fat orange c u n t was in glowing health then admitted that the baldy orange loser dictated the letter.

Harold Bornstein Dead: Donald Trump’s Doctor Who Faked Letter Saying He Was In Pristine Shape Dies At 73

Sylvain Sylvain, showboating guitarist of New York Dolls, dies aged 69

Sylvain Sylvain, showboating guitarist of New York Dolls, dies aged 69 | Music | The Guardian

Sylvain Sylvain, the guitarist who blended punk aggression with glam rock peacocking as part of the band New York Dolls, has died of cancer aged 69.
The news was announced on his Facebook page, with a statement saying that he had the disease for two and a half years. “While we grieve his loss, we know that he is finally at peace and out of pain,” it adds. “Please crank up his music, light a candle, say a prayer and let’s send this beautiful doll on his way.”
Sylvain was born in Cairo in 1951, emigrating with his family to France and then New York state. After moving to New York City, he ran a clothing company and formed the group Actress, who – after adding frontman David Johansen – became the New York Dolls in 1971.
Although they only released two albums in the 1970s, neither of which were crossover successes, the New York Dolls had a huge influence on the city’s music. By linking the nihilist cool of the Velvet Underground to the androgynous showmanship of the glam rock set and a pop sensibility with cult hits like Personality Crisis, they presaged the punk that would flourish later that decade.
Sylvain described his style in a 2018 interview: “You took your life in your hands just getting to the gig … One time I had this knitted pink women’s suit. It was nice. I turned the skirt into gaucho pants. I wore them with my boots. I put on the makeup. I’m going to make my $15. I’ll never forget all the catcalls.”
Amid chaotic gigs and hedonistic behaviour, the New York Dolls’ lineup shifted, with Sylvain and Johansen the only two constants until the band’s eventual breakup in 1977. Sylvain started a new band, the Criminals, with ex-New York Dolls member Tony Machine and later fitfully released solo albums during the 80s and 90s. He later formed the band the Batusis and also toured with Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols for the “Sex Doll” tour in 2013.
In 2004, three of the original New York Dolls members including Sylvain reformed at the request of Morrissey, who was curating that year’s Meltdown music festival in London. They ended up releasing three further albums, and undertook the 2011 Glam-a-Geddon tour alongside Mötley Crüe and Poison. Sylvain published a memoir, There’s No Bones in Ice Cream, in 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctg5FCS1wCM

Phil Spector, Producer Of The Beatles’ Let It Be, Dies Aged 81


https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?...id=63386&stc=1

Phil Spector, the music producer behind The Beatles’ Let It Be who was imprisoned for shooting an actress, has died aged 81.

Spector reportedly died from coronavirus-related complications in hospital, having been transferred from his prison cell.

It is understood he was first diagnosed with the infection four weeks ago and went to the hospital, but it was thought he had made a recovery.

He was serving a life sentence for the murder of Lana Clarkson.

As per TMZ, Spector’s condition deteriorated after he began to have trouble breathing on Saturday.

In 2009, a jury found Spector guilty of Clarkson’s death, six years after she was found dead in his mansion in California.

During his career as a music producer, he worked on a number of hits, including The Righteous Brothers’ You Lost that Lovin’ Feeling, and the Ronnettes’ Be My Baby. He also produced Tina Turner’s River Deep, Mountain High.

In 1989, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Fall of Fame.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Turner recalled the time she went into the studio to work on the single.

‘It looked like there were about 50 musicians, 25 singers, and Phil was in the midst of tearing up what looked like an arrangement. I wish all of the people that I sing for could have seen Phil Spector in action, working there with all those people and getting that sound,’ she said.

Phil Spector, Producer Of The Beatles’ Let It Be, Dies Aged 81 - UNILAD

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Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

During his career as a music producer, he worked on a number of hits, including The Righteous Brothers’ You Lost that Lovin’ Feeling, and the Ronnettes’ Be My Baby. He also produced Tina Turner’s River Deep, Mountain High.

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And Beatles, Harrison, Lennon etcetc

Rothchild's?